Why use Sergey with y when the Roman letter
Y is so ambiguous?
In German, y is only in foreign words like "yeti"
In English, y is sometimes a consonant and sometimes a vowel. Vowel: cry, try, rhythm
Consonant: yellow, young.
If I had never heard the name before, I am not sure I would guess correctly how to say it.
However, for Sergei, the ei follows the English rule, "I before E except after C, or when sounded as A, as in neighbor or weigh.
So if the pronunciation is Ser´ gay, I would get it right. If not, back to square one.
Modern Russian transliteration to Roman seems to put Ys everywhere, and it is not a helpful change.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet#Archaic_Latin_alphabet
Old Latin had no Y and no J, so in countries feeling a need for one or the other sound, there is no consistency
Since it seems appropriate to where the conversation is at the moment, I would like to bring in the Greek letter gamma (uppercase: Γ ; lowercase: γ ).
Traditionally, Greek used to be transliterated phoenetically. So, gamma was written in Latin characters as "Y", as it had an "ee" sound.
But, nowadays it is officially transliterated as "G". Which causes a lot of confusion (and cringe-worthy pronounciations of Greek words) amongst foreigners.
Take the Greek word for a female saint - "Αγία". It is pronounced "I-ee-ah", and so used to be transliterated as "Ayia". But nowadays it is transliterated as "Agia", which does not give much indication towards the pronounciation.
Derived from the word "Αγία" is the Greek name for the virgin Mary, "Παναγία" (pronounced: "Pan-I-ee-ah"; old translisteration: "Panayia"; new transliteration: "Panagia"). And from this, you get the male name "Παναγιώτης" (pronounced: "Pan-I-ee-oh-tis"; old transliteration: "Panayiotis"; new transliteration: "Panagiotis).
Which just happens to be the first name of one of the revelations of this season so far: German singles skater turned ice dancer Παναγιώτης Πολυζωάκης!
As his
ISU Bio uses the new transliteration of "Panagiotis Polyzoakis", and he was born and reared in Germany, it would be very easy for us foreigners to assume that his first name would be pronounced a German way (perhaps "Pa-na-gee-oh-tis"). Fortunately, his nickname "Joti" (pronounced in German as "Yoh-tee") indicates that he does in fact use the original Greek pronounciation.
Returning to "Αγία", and the Greek name for Saint Barbara is "Αγία Βαρβάρα". This used to be transliterated phoenetically as "Ayia Varvara", but is now transliterated as "Agia Varvara".
As you may have worked out, there is another reason why I chose Saint Barbara. It is because the Green letter beta (uppercase: Β ; lowercase: β ) is not pronounced like a "B" as us foreigners would expect; it is actually pronounced like a "V". In fact, the "B" sound does not exist in Modern Greek, so there is no need for it to have it's own letter.
[To further confuse matters, the Greek equivalent of the letter "N" is nu. And whilst the uppercase version does look like an "N" (Ν), the lowercase version looks like a "V" (ν)].
Because there are sounds in other languages that don't exist in Greek, it can lead to some novel spellings when foreign words are transliterated into Greek, and then back into Latin characters.
For example, the ice rink in Limassol, Cyprus, is located in a shopping centre on Franklin Roosevelt Avenue. In Greek, this is written as "Λεωφόρος Φραγκλίνου Ρούσβελτ", which when transliterated back into Latin characters comes out as "Leoforos Fragklinou Rousvelt".
As another example, one of the streets in Nicosia (the capital of Cyprus) is named "John Kennedy Avenue". In Greek, this is written as "Λεωφόρος Τζον Κέννεντυ", which when transliterated back into Latin characters comes out as "Leoforos Tzon Kennenty".
Which is not too dissimilar to what happens when John Guerreiro's name is transliterated into Cyrillic characters ("Джон Гурейро"), and then back into Latin characters ("Dzhon Gurreyro").
So, it's not just with Russian names that problems can arise when they are transliterated into Latin characters!
CaroLiza_fan
I kind of felt Russian was easy as the word endings were so simple to learn, if you know the rules you can say pretty much anything right and there are also just three tenses if I am right?
My wife studies Spanish now, it looks terribly complicted too 
Apart from English and German we had a short (just a few months) course of Latin at the university (later, I studied it by myself for some time), some years ago I made a tiny attempt to start learning Spanish... I also studied Serbian once (it was funny and easy, because it has so much in common with Russian). I wrote a course work at the university about J.Tolkien's invented languages - and as there was virtually no information about it in Russian at that time, I used a very profound English site on this subject, and a German-Sindarin online dictionary to prepare it...
